Advanced Aircraft Analysis

Advanced Aircraft Analysis (AAA) is a comprehensive airplane design program that gives its users full authority over the entire preliminary design process. From weight and performance sizing to aerodynamics and stability and control analysis, you can monitor all aspects of the design every step of the way.
AAA is an industry standard aircraft design, stability and control analysis software and is installed in over 56 countries and is used by major aeronautical engineering universities, aircraft manufacturers and military organizations worldwide. The high fidelity, physics-based methods of AAA, combined with its time-tested semi-empirical methods, have improved the ability for aerospace engineers to analyze more unconventional airplane designs and to stay at the forefront of our ever-evolving industry.

Advanced Aircraft Analysis provides a powerful framework to support the iterative and non-unique process of aircraft preliminary design. The AAA program allows students and preliminary design engineers to take an aircraft configuration from early weight sizing through open loop and closed loop dynamic stability and sensitivity analysis, while working within regulatory and cost constraints.

Advanced Aircraft Analysis can be used to design fighter style airplanes and high speed airplanes. The detailed drag module allows designers to go all the way to supersonic flow. The stability and control derivatives modules only deal with subsonic flow (up to about Mach=0.7) for most derivatives. It does not calculate the derivatives for transonic and supersonic flow. Most other modules do not have a speed dependency and can be used in any speed regime.

Advanced Aircraft Analysis is used for preliminary and Class II design and stability and control analysis of new and existing airplanes. Class II design incorporates detailed weight & balance, aerodynamics, stability & control calculations including trim analysis and flying qualities used in conjunction with the preliminary design sequence. Class II design accounts for power plant installation, landing gear disposition and component locations on the airplane. Class II uses more sophisticated methods than Class I and requires more detailed information of the airplane to be known. The accuracy of Class II methods is therefore greater than Class I methods.

Advanced Aircraft Analysis can be used for small (civil), military and transport airplanes. The program is designed to assist in the design learning process while reserving for the user the individual creative judgment which is essential to the process of airplane design.

Advanced Aircraft Analysis applies to most fixed wing configurations (civil and military aircraft) and allows design engineers to rapidly evolve an airplane configuration from weight sizing through detailed performance calculations and cost estimations. All applicable performance and flying quality regulations are available in the AAA program. This provides the designer with an instant appraisal of the status of the design relative to these regulations.

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Advanced Aircraft Analysis uses both British and S.I. units. The program can switch between both units within the same project. The calculator allows temporary change of units (for instance enter engine power in HP, while the project is in SI units and needs kW).

When development of Advanced Aircraft Analysis (AAA) started, the design methodology was based on Airplane Design, Parts I-VIII, Airplane Flight Dynamics and Automatic Flight Controls, Parts I and II, by Dr. Jan Roskam, Airplane Aerodynamics and Performance, by Dr. C.T. Lan and Dr. Jan Roskam. AAA incorporates the methods, statistical databases, formulas and relevant illustrations and drawings from these references. Visit our Book Store to purchase these and other
high-quality aeronautics resources.

Since development began many new methods based on Federal Aviation Regulations, Datcom, methods from NACA and NASA and methods developed by DARcorporation engineers have been incorporated in AAA. DARcorporation engineers have over 25 years of aircraft design experience and data collected from wind tunnel testing has been used to validate and improve these design methods. All methods are documented in the AAA Help system. Many of these methods deal with modern aircraft (use of composites) and unconventional configurations, includeing VTOL (tilt-rotor, tilt-wing designs).

Advanced Aircraft Analysis Development

Advanced Aircraft Analysis has been under development for more than 25 years, at a cost of over 70,000 man hours and more than four million dollars.

You will spend more in a two-month period developing your own in-house code, in man-hour cost alone, than if you purchased one commercial license of AAA.

You will save over 80% in man-hour costs using AAA for preliminary design, versus using handbook and spreadsheet calculations. Click the link to read more about AAA vs. Spreadsheets.

Using AAA will greatly reduce calculation errors.

Being able to use multiple flight conditions (forward c.g., aft c.g., low speed, high speed, flaps up, flaps down, etc.) is a unique feature of AAA and significantly reduces time to track data and prevent potential errors.

The "Recalculate All" feature in AAA is a significant time savings tool and allows you to export the data for different flight conditions into an Excel or text file. All plots for trim diagram, for example, can be saved as separate graphics files, using this same feature.

We use AAA for our airplane design consulting services. We are constantly updating and refining the methods used, based on our research and wind tunnel tests that we perform. This leads to regular software version updates, which benefits all of our software clients.

Advanced Aircraft Analysis consists of 10 independent modules. Each module is designed to perform the tasks necessary to evaluate the characteristics of a given aircraft at each stage of the preliminary design.